Me? Work for Klick? LOL! No, their counter staff are minimum-wage muppets generally. Our local one has brought cameras in to me to load for their customers a few times!
“Fair enough snapper, i understand you think what im saying is bollocks but is what i said about 20/30 min photo quality correct or incorrect? At least put me right.”
Its *sometimes* correct – but sweeping generalisations are straight away worthless (ooops, my prior sentence shoots me in the foot). It takes me 12 minutes to do a film, from taking it out of the customers hand, to putting i in the completed drawer. That takes into account extracting the leader, shaping the end, feeding into the neg processor (automatically taken through dev, bleach-fix, stabilisers and dryer), taking out, feeding through the dust brushes and into the printer. Then, adjusting colour and density of every image on the analyser screen, hitting the print key (thence through dev, bleach-fix, stabilisers and dryer), chopping the negs up and sleeving them, and checking for disasters. 4 minutes to get the required reprints through – rarely needed. . The thing is, in all labs, each morning the machines are balanced against reference prints. This minimises any problems – therefore a muppet like me can *almost* guarantee decent results, which are detected in a quick flick through. As can anyone I train to do my job (which, in all honesty, is dead easy). It used to be more complex. I learnt in the days when you ‘read’ each neg, and punched in the density and any neccesary correction for colour. Within a month I was beating ANY colour analyser equipped machines (this would have been the case up until the analysers that appeared 3 years ago or so, but those, like almost all minilabs manufactured now, are digital) I do the same routine for a 24 hour as I do for a one hour, and could offer a 20 minute service If I felt it was needed – I don’t, as that would mess me up in the event of a machine breakdown. My advantage is that I am a photographer by trade, so I have that extra bit of ‘gen’ to back me up. As I want an easy life, and can pay my mortgage in this way with minimum effort, I do this for a living. The photography (and other stuff) I do for myself on the side supplements my income rather nicely indeed. I have never had a roll of my own stuff done at Klick, but their machinery is first-rate. Its large scale commercial stuff, of the same ilk as Kodak etc use.
Question is, why do you uprate neg film? All you succeed in doing is dramatically increasing grain and contrast. Slide film is good for it, as is black and white, but with 2-3 stops latitude, unless in a dire emergency, its really not worth doing. I doubt the Klick bods would know what you meant, generally, but would the majority of labs? Even if the minilabs did know what you meant, I don’t rate your chances of them doing anything about it – few know how to do it with a machine (1.2 degrees on the developer per stop, which is a break in production of 20 minutes for the machine to warm up and cool down again) and fewer still would consider doing it.
My biggest problem with quality is the crap I get handed in to develop (from which I imagine you are exempt – with the gear you have, you almost definately know how to use it). Fogged, very underexposed, very overexposed, over-flashed, out-of-date, cheap films, films found in drawers, films that have been in the washing machine, scratched because they are from the bottom of a beach-bag with a light trap full of sand, double exposed, unexposed……the list goes on.
(anyway, bollocks, specifically, referred to the generalisation. It is an old clerical term you know.) Hope this is of some interest – any more questions, please ask and i’ll do my best to answer them.
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